Moving the Body: Affective Imaginations of Illness and Disability
Femi Eromosele (Utrecht University) Andries Hiskes (University of Humanistic Studies)
Illness and disability configure the body as a site of affective movement: of intensities that circulate between bodies, texts, discourses, and social imaginaries. Affect not only shapes the lived experience of illness and impairment; it also mediates the intersubjective encounters, interpretations, and value judgments through which bodies are read, classified, and responded to. Within disability studies and the medical humanities, this relational dimension has been approached from multiple angles: Ato Quayson's (2007) account of aesthetic nervousness in encounters with disability, Bill Hughes's (2012) analysis of how fear, pity, and disgust function to hierarchize disabled bodies, and Ann Jurecic's (2012) challenge to criticism’s distrust of affective engagement with illness narratives. Across these discussions, imaginative and aesthetic forms emerge as crucial sites in which affect is given form, circulation, and meaning.
This volume departs from the premise that representations of illness and disability do more than reflect embodied experience. Through narrative, visual, performative, and other imaginative and representational practices and genres, affect is mobilized in ways that shape how bodies are perceived, interpreted, and governed. Such practices can reproduce dominant biomedical framings of health and pathology, but they can also unsettle them: opening alternative ways of perceiving embodiment, suffering, care, and dependency that exceed individualized or strictly medicalized accounts.
Moving the Body invites contributions that examine how such practices engage, organize, and transform affective understandings of illness and disability. We welcome work grounded in literary and cultural analysis, disability studies, medical humanities, affect theory, aesthetics, and related fields, and we are open to a range of theoretical traditions and methodological approaches.
Thematic Areas
We welcome contributions addressing, but not limited to:
Affective formations: How do imaginative practices shape collective and subjective experiences of suffering, vulnerability, or resilience? How do specific genres or representational traditions give form to embodied responsivity and medicalized subjectivities?
Affective economies: How do texts and artworks participate in classificatory regimes that distinguish between “good” and “bad” affects? How do emotional states become pathologized, valorized, or instrumentalized within discourses of health? What political or social work does the circulation of pity, disgust, inspiration, or grief perform?
Affect and aesthetics: How do representations of illness and disability generate affective paradigms through which bodies—corporeal and textual—are experienced as sites of aesthetic pleasure, discomfort, resistance, or refusal?
Care, healing, and affective alternatives: How do imaginative and representational practices confront the limits of biomedical discourse and institutions? What alternative frameworks for affective relationality and responsivity do they articulate?
Scope
We welcome work grounded in literary and cultural analysis, disability studies, medical humanities, affect theory, aesthetics, and related fields, and are open to a range of theoretical traditions and methodological approaches. Contributions may engage literature, visual art, performance, film, digital media, sound, participatory or community-based arts, or other imaginative practices.
Submission Guidelines
Contributors should submit abstracts of approximately 400 words, including a provisional title and brief author bio, by 22 June 2026 to Femi Eromosele (e.f.eromosele@uu.nl) and Andries Hiskes (a.hiskes@uvh.nl).
Final chapters of 7,500–8,000 words (including references) are due 15 February 2027. Please follow the MLA Handbook (9th edition) for citations and works cited.